Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Testament of Orpheus
1960 · Jean Cocteau · Testament of Orpheus on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch a torn flower rebuild itself when the film runs backward. (cutting)
Cocteau destroys and restores objects on screen using nothing but reversed footage, a trick he had used thirty years earlier and repeats here at seventy.
Payoff: Neither the broken flower nor the whole one is the real state; the image simply refuses to pick. In the reading: crystalline-description. Deleuze calls this a crystalline description: the image makes and unmakes its object with nothing behind it to check against.
Notice how stark and high-contrast the black-and-white image is. (light)
Pontoiseau's camera isolates figures against blank sky and bare stone, with no gray softening the image, so each encounter reads like an engraving.
Payoff: Cocteau wanted a moving drawing, not a photograph, and the contrast is how he gets it.
Watch the actors hold frozen, statuesque poses. (staging)
Cocteau composes in tableaux: the Poet before his judges, masked figures like Minerva in armor and a horse-headed man, arranged to signify rather than to act.
Payoff: Every pose asks to be read like a picture, not followed like a plot. In the reading: lectosign (the readable image). Deleuze calls an image that must be deciphered rather than acted on a lectosign, exactly what these poses ask of you.
Listen to Cocteau's own voice narrate what you're seeing. (sound)
His voice-over runs constantly over the images, commenting on them and admitting the whole thing is his own artifice, not hiding the construction.
Payoff: You are never allowed to forget a specific man built every image you are watching. In the reading: speech act (legending voice). Deleuze calls this a speech act: a voice caught legending its own images instead of simply describing them.
Watch for famous faces appearing as themselves in the wasteland. (performance)
Picasso, Yul Brynner, Charles Aznavour, and other real friends of Cocteau's turn up playing themselves among the masked, costumed figures.
Payoff: Real people and invented myth share the same frame with no way for you to sort one from the other.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the seam, the moment each trick turns one thing into another.